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New Zealand Tanker Fire
Location: Auckland, New Zealand Date: August 9, 1990 Story On the evening of August 9, 1990, Gaylene Young of Manukau, a suburb in the south of Auckland, New Zealand, stopped her car in the road to drop off her twelve-year-old daughter, Shirley, at the local mall. David Petera was standing in the parking lot when he noticed Shirley run back to the car and lean inside to talk to Gaylene. That moment, not far up the road, a truck hauling more than 8,700 gallons of gasoline to a service station almost collided with a taxi that pulled out in front of it. The trucker, Buddy Marsh, swerved and missed the car, but he didn't see Gaylene stopped in his path. He turned the wheel sharply to avoid her--but not in time. The tanker slammed into her car, jackknifed, and crushed her and Shirley underneath it. Then both vehicles burst into a fiery ball. Rescue units from the New Zealand Fire Service sped to the scene as Petera and Marsh, who managed to escape, pulled a screaming Gaylene from the fiery wreckage. When Station Officer Graham Haycock and Senior Firefighter Royd Kennedy arrived, flames were shooting sixty feet into the air, and the heat was so intense that they couldn't get within thirty feet of the tanker. A river of fiery fuel poured from it and headed straight for the mall. Haycock and Kennedy saw Gaylene lying on the ground, badly burned, and they hosed her off to cool the burns. "My baby! "My baby's in the car!" she cried. The firefighters knew Shirley had to be dead. Haycock and Kennedy went to the back of the tanker where they were engulfed in black smoke swirling at ground level. Suddenly, Kennedy could have sworn he saw an arm waving in the smoke. He ran straight into the fire where he saw, crushed under the wheel of the tanker, a little girl screaming for help. "She was really scared," recalls Kennedy. "Mind you, so was I. But I let her know I wasn't going to leave her--no matter what." At the risk of losing his own life, Kennedy wrapped his arms around Shirley and stayed by her side while firefighters battled the blaze. Fire flashed past them, and freezing cold water beat down on them from the firefighters' hoses. "When you get out of here," Kennedy told her, "we're going horseback riding." "She was a battler," adds Kennedy. "And it's a great thing to draw your own reserves of strength from when you've got someone like that next to you--who's only twelve years old." In a race against time, rescuers worked to boost the tanker's wheel assembly just high enough to lift Shirley out, using air bags and hydraulic pump. But she started to fade. "If I don't make it," she said to Kennedy, "tell my mother I love her." Kennedy administered oxygen to a now unconscious Shirley until rescuers succeeded in raising the tanker. Forty minutes after being trapped under the vehicle, Kennedy carried her out of the wreckage, placed her on a stretcher, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he collapsed himself. "After the rescue was completed," recalls Haycock, "the fire just went out. Just like that--''foof''! And I felt as if the devil had backed off now that Shirley had been removed from the fire." Shirley and Gaylene spent months recovering in the hospital. Shirley suffered second and third degree burns over 20 percent of her body. Both of her legs were badly broken, one so severely that it had to be amputated. She made a marvelous recovery, and five months after the accident, Kennedy kept his promise and took her horseback riding. Their relationship has grown into a very special one, and Kennedy thinks of her as a daughter. Gaylene feels that his action went way beyond heroism. "If Shirley had had to go," says Gaylene, "I don't think he would have left her side. I think he would have given his life." "Royd did what I hope any firefighter would have done," says Divisional Officer Ray Warby. "But I wouldn't ask any firefighter to do it." "So many people can learn from that child and she went through," says Kennedy, "from her strength of character. She's a million dollars, that kid. Boy, we haven't heard the last of her."﻿﻿﻿ Category:1990 Category:New Zealand Category:Motor-Vehicle Accidents Category:Fires Category:Burns Category:Crush Injuries Category:Amputations